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Lessig Spins Copyright Law
ceebABC writes "In the always riveting CIO Insight magazine, tech-pundit (and professor) Lawrence Lessig examines the copyright laws and how they can be applied to e-books and other electronic forms of rights management... i.e., in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?"
in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?
The ultimate goal of most publishers is likely to be pay-per-read. In other words, royalties for the PUBLISHER. The author might recieve 0.00000001% of this, or something like that, if they are lucky.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
in today's world, the author doesn't receive a royalty everytime someone reads a book from the library. Will they in the future?
Nope. This was tried with new-fangled technology - the pay-per-view DVDs. It failed because folks aren't (quite) that dumb.
If you think that folks will 'buy that' for the written word - a technology that has been around for a long time, you're a fool. Hell, folks won't even buy e-books that they can re-read.
He's got good points about if you have a book now, you can loan it to friends or borrow it from the library without any troubles.
The problem is, that before eBooks, you couldn't "loan" your copy of the book to 10,000 of your friends on Kazaa.
There are some interesting ideas in there, but I don't think his ideas are the answer. They are a good start though.
The ultimate goal of most publishers is likely to be pay-per-read. In other words, royalties for the PUBLISHER. The author might recieve 0.00000001% of this, or something like that, if they are lucky.
The publishers are out of luck if they want to kill an author's percentage.
For most, it's contractually set at a certain rate (whole percantage points of the gross sale), and the publisher making MORE money only means more money for the author.
Last numbers I heard had an author's royalties at somewhere between 1% and 5%. And the big names--those that bring in the massive ammounts of sales that keep publishers in busienss--certainly won't sell their already-done-and-anyone-can-print-it books for less than this.
Why not have a short copyright term as the standard (say life + 10 years). But if a corporate entity wants to keep that copyright past that point, it would have to pay a substantial fixed fee plus some small royalties to the government (i.e. a tax on profits).
This way, the list of long-term copyrights would be small, maintained in a single place, and thus easily searchable. There would be a financial disincentive in place to keep companies from locking up works unless they were actively making money. Companies are happy, museums are happy, the gov'ment is happy, and the internet is happy.
-- Heisenberg might have slept here.
Clearly, an exact duplicate of the existing system with pay-per-read royalties wouldn't work. But what if this hypothetical library can "buy" books for 1/10 of the current price in electronic form, but pay a small amount for each reading?
Small libraries would suddenly be able to have millions of available volumes, and users of the library will have far more choice than before. The tradeoff would be that money previously spent in acquiring actual paper and storing it would be spent in paying for an equivalent amount of "electronic publishing" or use fees.
I don't think this sounds so terrible.
Lessig brings up an excellent point that only 147 out of about 10000 books from the 20's are still in print. What happened to the rest of this knowledge? The rest of this creativity? It has been lost and forgotten.
We were supposed to build our society on the shoulders of giants. Instead we've institutionally forgotten everything that came before us. It seems appropriate that our attention spans are now short enough not to notice what we've lost.
Societally, we're only a step away from being the old lady in a flannel nighty that keeps wandering away from the old folks home.
The baby's fine -- please stop sending business cards.
This story, which you all really should have read by now, depicts a world of copyright/DRM/Etc. laws to the extreme:
The Right to Read
The scariest line definitely comes after:
most of the specific laws and practices described above have already been proposed
A Minesweeper clone that doesn't suck
...till I have to play "catch the monkey" in order to read the climax?
I'll form my OWN solar system! With blackjack! And hookers!
Authors should definitely recieve royalties - just not from a public library that my tax dollars went to fund.
I'm an author, and I don't object at all to my books ending up on library shelves. When it happens, it means I'm probably "relieved" of 97% of my royalty for each time the book is read -- given that I suppose the average library book is checked out 30 times. But I don't care that this is such a bad deal for me, since I think it's great that people are reading my book.
But I bristle at your notion that libraries ought to be entitled to distribute recently created copyrighted works, with no compensation whatsoever to the author. On what basis do you feel that government should essentially engage in intellectual theft?
I'm trying to understand your point of view, but I can't make any sense of it. It seems totally selfish and poorly thought out.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Not necessarily -- you could just have a roommate or an officemate tuned to a ClearChannel station.
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I read the actual copy right law as applied to print and recordings. It seems fairly straight forward.
You buy a book. You own the book. You can sell the book. You can make copies of the book for personal use. If you sell the original, all the copies have to be destroyed, or go with the original. You can't sell copies with out the copy right holders permission. You can even loan the book, as long as the person you loan it to returns it and doesn't keep a copy.
I can't understand why software is being treated in a different manner.
Just my two cents.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
Treasure Planet - Treasure Island (duh)
Snow White - Grim
Pinocchio - Grim
Cinderella - Grim
Peter Pan
Sleeping Beauty - Grimm
The Jungle Book - Kipling
The Little Mermaid - Andersen
Beauty and the Beast
Alice in Wonderland - Carrol
I may be wrong on the authors (from memory) but those are all books in the Public Domain that have been hijacked by Disney, and are aggressively defended by them.
Funny.
Pinocchio - Grim
The Adventures of Pinocchio is not by the Grimm Bros. but rather by Carlo "Collodi" Lorenzini. You can read about Collodi, or read an English translation of Pinocchio .
books in the Public Domain that have been hijacked by Disney, and are aggressively defended by them.
The Walt Disney Company does not own the rights to the novel Pinocchio or to the name "Pinocchio". DisneyCo owns only the copyright on its film adaptation[1], including the likenesses of the characters as drawn by Disney animators, and has no grounds to prevent other publishers' film adaptations of the original novel. DisneyCo most definitely does not own the rights to "Noddy", a character created by Enid Blyton that may have been inspired by Pinocchio.
The Jungle Book - Kipling
Which exemplifies . No less than one year after The Jungle Book went PD in a major market, DisneyCo published a film adaptation. The company was obviously waiting for the copyright to run out. Now DisneyCo has closed the door behind itself by pushing copyright term extensions through Congress.
Peter Pan
NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN WORLDWIDE! The European Union recognizes a monopoly on literary works for the life of the last surviving author, plus the remainder of the calendar year, plus 70 years. Because J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, died in 1937, copyright in Peter Pan does not expire in the European Union until 2007, and DisneyCo has to pay GOSH a royalty for every Peter Pan and Return to Never Land disc sold in the EU. In fact, the United Kingdom has granted a statutory perpetual copyright on the work, with royalties going to a children's hospital.
[1] DisneyCo may lose even that if the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft happens to strike down the 1976 extension along with the Bono Act.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The type of protection a creative work receives should not hinge on the notion that transmitting an e-book involves making a copy or that reading a library book does not. These are legal nitpicks. The Supreme Court could decide that reading a book constitutes copying the contents of the book into your brain. Then the very act of reading would technically be regulated by copyright law. To me it doesn't matter whether this type of regulation is achieved by ridiculously redefining the notion of "copying" or by introducing book licensing. Either tactic is government by hair-splitting.
The question of copyright shouldn't revolve around the technical interpretation of existing law. The question should be how, in real terms in today's world, copyright law can best implement the intent that is stated in the Constitution, which is simply to provide incentive to produce new works.
If e-books are to be considered a threat to creativity and invention, it should be because e-books might make it difficult for an author to recoup the cost of creating the work, thus discouraging new works. It should not be because somebody decided that transmitting an e-book is technically making a copy. The latter argument assumes that the point of copyright is to protect authors indirectly by protecting the copy-making business directly. It isn't, and it never was.
As much as I respect Lessig, I wish he and other high-profile people who are thrashing out this issue would depart from dissecting the fine points of laws that weren't written with enough resolution to cover current conditions. What they are doing amounts to adding extra zeroes after the decimal point and arguing over the accuracy of the numbers. I wish they would consider that in a very few years, when almost anybody on earth will have the capability to publish their own work to the entire world at practically zero cost. Copyright law of the future should provide an incentive for the people and institutions who PRODUCE new works, not for those who merely make and sell copies.